Tumbling on success: How Tumblr's David Karp built a £500 million empire

Tumblr's David Karp, at 25, has a £500 million empire of blogs devoted to protests, porn and photographs of cats

Chris Crisman

Tumblr tales

The artistEat Sleep Draw
receives 800-1,000 submissions a week and publishes a picture every
hour, 24 hours a day -- that's more than 35,000 pieces to date. It
has 160,000 followers and gets 500,000 page views a month. "It's
pretty wicked considering I'm not paying for hosting," says
26-year-old Lee. Despite high traffic, Eat Sleep Draw currently
makes only "a couple of hundred bucks a month" from ads and by
selling custom-made sketchbooks. However, Lee is confident that
he can turn his tumblr into a sustainable business.

The porn star... Jessie Andrews created her
Tumblr [NSFW] for one reason: "You can post nude
pictures without them getting deleted," she says. The 19-year-old,
from Miami, has appeared in more than 50 adult movies, and says
Tumblr helps her connect with fans. "It doesn't help me get work,
but photographers and directors sometimes get their eye caught on
my page and ask questions," says Andrews.

And the president
Barack Obama's 2008 US election campaign made good use of Twitter
and Facebook. For the 2012 election, the US president's staff added Tumblr,
"because of its submission feature". The (unnamed) campaign staff
running it encourage users to upload photos and jokes. In its first
six weeks, the site has published more than 60 posts, including
behind-the-scenes photos and videos from the campaign, posters and
infographics.